Fait Accompli

Day 32 Friday 10th September 2010

Nagoya Port....enormous

Today we are up early and on the road back to Kyoto. I decide to take the new highway called the Shin Meishin expressway. The first leg is from Toyota to Nagoya port. We are surrounded by car transporters loaded with Toyota product on its way to all corners of the world. A great number of the cars are the hybrid Prius model. I can’t believe the world has fallen in love with this silly car and bought into the whole hybrid hype. Why would anyone pay a huge premium for an underwhelming, below average performing, ugly duckling like this? It’s a brilliant piece of marketing on Toyota's part .  Both governments and consumers the world over have been sucked into this  idiocy . Nagoya port has to be seen to be believed. It’s huge.  It’s obvious to me just by driving along the endless flyovers that cross the port that Nagoya is doing better than Osaka. The docks on Osaka bay are every bit as big but nowhere near as busy. On stopping at a convenience store for a drink I see a vending machine with eggs in it. Handy for those egg emergencies I guess.  There are about 5.5 million vending machines in Japan….one for every 20 people. The internet is full of amusing articles about these so I not going to go there other than to say this. If you put a vending machine with beer in it on a street in NZ you would have a lot of drunken kids stumbling around the vicinity. Vending machines cater for every need but I think I have found a gap in the market. I haven’t seen any drive thru vending machines. Imagine being able to drive up to a vending machine and getting a delicious beverage without having to get out of your car! It’s the ultimate in convenience. Americans would love it. As we get into Mie prefecture the traffic thins out and the highway winds through some nice countryside. The highway is new here, so new in fact that my 2006 navigation CD ROM shows us driving off road through virgin countryside. This highway is 3 lanes each side in places and goes through some amazing tunnels and yet was built in such a short space of time it’s rendered my CD obsolete in less than 4 years. Back home they have spent much longer just arguing about where a road will go.  A project like the Shin Meishin would take 20 – 30 years to complete in NZ. That’s Japan…when they want to they can make stuff happen. Of course it doesn’t take long to find a contradiction. This highway deposits us into the middle of Kyoto city. There is no ring road or connection to the Kyoto Jukan highway which we must take to get to Kameoka. We need to drive through the neighbourhood for 30 minutes in bad traffic before we get back on the highway. We pull into the supermarket and get some food to barbeque tonight. 

Before

After

Overgrown

Zen

    

Kitchen disaster

reformed

It’s going to be our first night in the house so we get some beer to celebrate. The weather is still absolutely beautiful. Blue skies and 30 degrees.  The house looks great. Some people had said that we would not get it finished on time but we’ve worked hard we have pulled it off. We light the barbeque and crack open a few cans. We have a lot to do tomorrow morning before we fly. I usually don’t sleep well before a flight and this night is no exception. It’s so quite here you would think that it would be easy to sleep but I’m conditioned to traffic noise and alarms and police sirens going off so it would take me some time to get used to the silence.  At 4.30 AM I hear some noise outside so I get up and look out the window. At first I can’t see anything. Then I make out the neighbour across the street, Mr Trump, moving around. This idiot is feeding his cats at 4.30AM on a Saturday morning in the pitch dark. Odd doesn’t even begin to describe these people.